Thursday, August 10, 2006

Insomnia

Ever feel so tired that you can't sleep? I know that some of you insomniac bloggers out there can relate to this. As I was surfing around the web, I found this article from WebMD. I talks about relating lack of sleep to low job satisfaction.

Researchers found men and women who suffered from insomnia were more likely to say they disliked or even hated their job the next day.

To me this is like -- DUH! Like I couldn't figure this out on my own. I needed a multi-million dollar study to confirm this? Of course, I agree with this. You've seen me on one of my "low job satisfaction" night when I asked "Why?"

Managing sleep is a difficult thing for me. I really appreciate everyone's encouraging words this week as I'm trying to get ahead of the curve again after some time off. While you're working, it's go-go-go-go -- I mean full steam ahead -- not trying to miss deadlines and trying to get things done on time. I don't know about you, but it takes me a few hours to wind down. My mind is continually going, sometimes replaying the day, and wondering whether I did everything right or whether I messed up somewhere.

And, then actually trying to sleep. When I actually try to relax, that's when my mind drifts to the day that just occurred and then drifts to the day ahead trying to plan ahead and anticipating all the pitfalls that will occur. I'm glad that I found blogging, so that I can at least get some thoughts out of my head so that I'm no longer thinking about it. I think I'll try to go to sleep again. We'll see what happens. At least my job satisfaction will increase, right?

10 comments:

If one of your patients told you what you just wrote, you would probably admonish them to leave their work at work. If you take all of your patients and all of your work responsibilities home every night, you're going to burn out sooner than later ...

Let the fall behind you when you leave work ... you can't do anything to change what's past. Do things for yourself - things you enjoy. Relax. Force yourself to not go there when your head wanders back to work. And then, in the morning, refreshed, face the day, taking it one thing at a time. It's useless to worry ahead - you just exhaust yourself, and leave yourself open to making mistakes because you're so frazzled.

I'm worried for you, my friend. You're trying too hard, methinks.

Dr. Anon ... physicians need private lives, too ... you know?

So - cut yourself some slack, and enforce "pleasure time" each day.

You need to read Eckhart Tolle: "The Power of Now." A physician friend of mine sent me his copy when I was going through a bad time. It really helped.

Life is what we live toaday. We all know tomorrow cannot be lived /worried about today. The same way living in the past is also fruitless. Life will go on whether we worry or not. What i feel important is whether we have spent enough quality time with all aspects that sorrounds our life - our proofession, our family, our friends and last not but the least ourselves. so i suggest you live for today and forget the past and future as both of them are not going to change.

Um...we're on the same wavelength again! When I had my first blog quite some time ago on xanga, I started it because I needed to get some thoughts out of my head so that I wouldn't concentrate on them all night long, keeping me awake! I still do that, to an extent. Working the evening shift is the worst for me - sometimes I come home and know I have something in the morning so I try to get to sleep immediately to grab like 6 or 7 hours of sleep...but this is always a bad idea. Whenever I try to "force" sleep, I don't get any. It amazes me that in spite of being exhausted sometimes, I just can't sleep.

It's always because of thoughts running around in my mind. I find that I start worrying about money or classwork or cleaning my desk off or what I'm going to do the next day and how to make use of my time. Before I know it, the sun is rising. Even though I know I do this, I still can't stop it! There are times on nights when I can't sleep where I think to myself, "OK Clear your head - imagine being on the beach." And I can get myself to stop thinking about other stuff, but I think it is still underlying because it never works to just relax me. I find that sleeping medications just leave me feeling more tired the next day...fake sleep, if you will!

Keep on hanging in there! It'll get better as time goes on... When we don't have any sleep, our reserve is low and our frustration tolerance also barely exists some days. That can make things that we would ordinarily deal with very well in fact quite difficult.

As I said in my other comment, when I came back from the shore, I worked a 12 hour day the next day. I had a tough assignment and got an admission and all kinds of things were going on. People were yelling at me for all kinds of things and suddenly I got very overwhelmed. It was hard to keep the tears in before I got into the quiet safety of my apartment. (I'm a girl...we cry a lot sometimes!) That night, I had one of those "good cries" but it gave me such a bad headache that I had to call out of work the next day! Not so efficient afterall... heh

The difficulty of coming back from vacation almost makes it not worth taking the vacation, even though we know that's not true!

I hope you get some sleep tonight. It's a very busy world out there today and you just have to do the best you can.

I find that three things help me unwind: 1) Write everything down I have to do-then I don't spend any time wondering about it. I keep a really good to do list. 2) Establish as many routines and learn as much time saving technology as possible so I can do things in the least amount of time. 3) Take some time every evening just for myself. You have to take a few minutes each day just to do nothing-even if it's only five minutes. Otherwise, you'll go crazy.

It is now about 3:45 am so yeah I know about this insomnia you talk about. I even had almost a 9 hour car ride this evening and night and still can't sleep.

I ditto every thing Moof and others have said. You push yourself to hard I think. Also, I'm happy you found blogging. I don't know what I would do without having this little place where I can unload and get so much support and understanding.

I did have one additional comment after reading the comments above. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like those of us that are single (and please correct my assumption if you're actually attached) seem to have a harder time leaving work at work than those with families, significant others, etc. When I come home, I get to see Tony, but for the most part, it's just me myself and I...and my laptop, of course! Tonight as I'm lying here, all kinds of conversations and thoughts from work float through my mind. I would love to leave work at work, but that would leave me with.....not much else.

Does that make sense at all to anybody? Not trying to be a downer, but I did think of that earlier!

Boy did this resonate. I know how that is - to be sleep deprived AND hating your job. However, for a while I couldn't figure it out which was it - lack of sleep making me hate my job or vice versa? Anyway, that is all in the past. The punchline there is that it happenned during the time that I was editor in chief for a magazine called HEALTH TODAY. More like, UN-HEALTHY TODAY.Doc, hope you can join my booklovers list on my entry today. I would love to know what books you read :) see you online!